I really hope someone can help as I am going batty with this one. I'm trying to help my brother over the phone, so will provide as much detail as I possibly can without being able to see the computer. Here goes:

Brother owns a 1999 Compaq Deskpro EP/SB. His hard drive crashed, and he got a new one- a Seagate IDE 40GB drive. It didn't come with any disks or instructions. He has installed it in the computer (all cables are connected properly) and set it to the Cable setting (as directed; it is his new Master drive).

When he turns the computer on and hits F10 for the menu, the new hard drive is shown- but it says the size and then the rest of the info about the drive is zeroed out. Nowhere in any of the menus can he find any info about Auto Detect, Manual, etc., and there is nowhere to enter the rest of the information about the drive. He assumed that the drive was in fact being recognized because the size was listed, so went ahead to try to install Windows XP.

Windows XP makes it thru the partitioning, and then gets to the part where it is formatting the drive. It makes it to 8% and then freezes, every time. We dont' know if this freezing is related to the fact that the info on his drive is zeroed out- i.e. is the drive not being fully detected? If not, how on earth do you find the BIOS info on how to do this, as Auto Detect etc. is not in any of the menus?

What else could be wrong here? I did try to get him to format the drive by doing a format c:/, before putting in the Windows XP disk, but he is unable to get to a screen with a blinking cursor. All he can pull up is the F10 menu, which is not interactive in any way and won't let him enter commands or change any settings that look like they might be helpful.

Any info would be immensely appreciated!!!!!!

Hi and welcome to D-A-L

is this the only drive on the IDE cable?

has he tried setting it to master, how big is the partition he's setting?

Thanks for the welcome!

He has tried it with every configuration, and at this point I believe there is another drive on the cable (the old setup had two drives, and one of the two failed; he kept the one which was still working and plugged it in as Slave). Having just the one drive on the cable (and leaving the Slave plug hanging) resulted in an error message- I don't recall which one, but I think it said Invalid disk or something to that extent. For some reason that error stopped when he added a Slave drive.

He has tried all the settings on the jumper- setting it to Master Only, etc... again was getting error messages until he put it to the Cable settings, which is what it says to do if your computer has a cable that decides master or slave (his does; there are separate plugs on the ribbon for each type). The errors stopped when he did this so we are assuming it's the correct setting.

Not sure of partition size, but he is just creating one partition out of all the space available.

is the version of XP a specific disc for compaq machines?

It isn't, no. It's actually a regular XP upgrade disk (he also has a full non-upgrade version of Windows 98, which he puts in to verify that is qualified for the upgrade). He tried installing the Windows 98 full version rather than XP, but got stuck where it asks for the floppy, as he no longer has that. Would it make a difference if the OS was a full vs. upgrade disk?

as it's the upgrade version I think it needs win 98 installed first

All you need to verify the upgrade is the '98 CD. Sounds like you've gotten past that point.

I would suggest trying to pre format that drive with GParted. XP CD's often have problems formatting RAW drives.

GParted is here:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

The upgrade version doesn't (in normal cases, where it's not a brand new hard drive) need 98 installed first, as there is a portion of the install where it has you insert the old 98 disk to prove you are eligible to upgrade, but you're not forced to install the old OS. You can install from an upgrade CD onto a blank drive. But I'm wondering if maybe the full OS disk has some formatting stuff on it that the upgrade disk doesn't, and that is the problem?

Jephree, can you explain how that program works? Will it be possible for him to use something like this if he can't get to a cursor- i.e., can he just put it in as a disk and boot from it?

It is a bootable Live CD.

You download the ISO file then need to burn the ISO Image to CD.

After that just boot the CD and partition/format or just format the drive to NTFS.

If you are not familiar with burning ISO's just ask. In Nero the option is referred to as "Create Disk Image".

If you do not have such software you can use this free ISO burner:

http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm

thanks, Jephree, I will try this. I will have to download the software as all I have is basic CD burning software. Will this work in spite of the drive being zeroed out, do you think?